Nicola Maher wins Uwe Radok Award for best PhD thesis

06.02.2018
Science
Ocean
Award

Dr. Nicola Maher

The Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (AMOS) awarded the Uwe Radok Award for best PhD thesis to Humboldt stipend Dr Nicola Maher, who has been visiting the department “The Ocean in the Earth System” at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) since February 2017. Maher will give an invited oral presentation and receive the award at the International Conference for Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and Oceanography on 06 February 2018.

The Uwe Radok Award is an annual award for the best PhD thesis for the preceding year in the fields of meteorology, oceanography, glaciology or climatology. The scientific panel reviews submissions under the criteria of: significance and innovation, approach, methodology and presentation, potential longer-term benefit.

Dr Nicola Maher wrote her dissertation “Natural drivers of Interannual to Decadal Variations in Surface Climate” at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and received ‘A’ grades from both her examiners. Her research resulted in six journal publications, and to her being awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship to undertake research at MPI-M. Her citations already exceed 200 and her work on decadal climate variability and the impacts of explosive volcanoes on Indo-Pacific climate has been particularly influential.

She is interested in how external forcing can excite modes of internal variability in the climate system. Maher: “While previous work has investigated this question, it remains unclear how interannual and decadal modes of variability may be influenced by such forcing. The work that I carry out during my time at MPI-M aims to address this question by undertaking a systematic study of the role of external drivers such as volcanic eruptions and anthropogenic greenhouse gas and aerosols in changing the characteristics of multiple modes of variability in climate models, particularly the MPI-ESM-LR model.” This work can be used to determine potential changes in modes of variability in the future and uncertainties on these projections.